Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Winston Churchill
November 16, 1934
London, England
10 p.m.
Winston Churchill obsesses about Adolf Hitler. Even if the rest of civilization does not.
The parliamentary gadfly sits before a new British Broadcasting Corporation Type A microphone. Friday night. Pages of typewritten speech arranged in a neat pile on the small, angled desk before him. Rain pattering out on Portland Place. Brick walls absorb the rumble of Bakerloo line Underground trains one hundred feet below. Churchill removes the cigar from the corner of his mouth. Draws a breath, focuses on the first sentence.
Cries wolf.
"I have but a short time to deal with this enormous subject. I beg you therefore to weigh my words with the attention and thought which I have given them," the fifty-nine-year-old implores the people of Britain. Breath of Hine's brandy, Stilton cheese, the Cuban.
Churchill's career is in reverse. Once the holder of high offices in the government, the politician is now a figure of scorn and ridicule. His jeremiad is unpopular and out of touch with Britain's antiwar sentiment. This makes him only more determined that his message must be heard.
"It is startling and fearful to realize that we are no longer safe in our island home. For nearly one thousand years England has never seen the campfires of an invader. Stormy seas and our Royal Navy have been our sure defense. . . . It is indeed with a pang of stabbing pain that we see all this in mortal danger. A thousand years has been spent to form a state-an hour may lay it in the dust.
"What shall we do?"
• • •
“Causes of War” is the theme of this evening’s broadcast, part of a series featuring prominent English thinkers. The first two speakers treated their discourse as an intellectual exercise, fawning over their topic with minutiae about arms manufacturing and flawed treaties. Their focus was a hypothetical conflict, war in the abstract.
But Churchill does not think another great war in Europe might happen-he is convinced it will happen. And now is the time to prepare.
"Only a few hours away by air there dwells a nation of nearly seventy million of the most educated, industrious, scientific people in the world, who are being taught from childhood to think of war as a glorious exercise and death in battle as the noblest deed for man. There is a nation which has abandoned all its liberties in order to augment its collective strength. There is a nation which with all its strength and virtue is in the grip of a group of ruthless men preaching a gospel of intolerance and racial pride unrestrained by law, by Parliament, or by public opinion. In that country, all pacifist speeches, all morbid books, are forbidden or suppressed and the authors rigorously imprisoned.
"From their new table of commandments they have omitted: Thou shalt not kill.
"It is but twenty years since these neighbors of ours fought almost the whole world and almost defeated them. Now they are rearming with the utmost speed. And ready to their hands is this new lamentable weapon of the air against which a navy has no defense and before which women and children, the weak and the frail, the pacifist and the jingo, the warrior and the civilian, the frontline trenches and the cottage home all lie in equal peril. Nay, worse still, for with the new weapon has come a new method or has come back the most brutish method of ancient barbarism-the possibility of compelling the submission of races by torturing their civil population. And worst of all, the more civilized the country is, the larger, more splendid its cities, the more intricate the structure of its social and economic life."
• • •
Churchill speaks of Adolf Hitler’s Germany.
The strongman's Nazi Party grew from a fringe Bavarian group to national power between 1920 and now. British intelligence estimates the dictator's private army of "storm troopers" numbers more than four hundred thousand. These thugs can be seen roaming the streets of Berlin, beating and whipping anyone suspected of being anti-Nazi. At the sight of Adolf-and no one ever calls him that-these excitable gangs raise their right arms in salute, bellowing "Heil Hitler."
The Nazi leader's response is a simple lifting of his palm in acceptance, a Caesar, his power assured.
As Churchill speaks on the radio tonight, it is just three months since the death of Germany's elected president, eighty-six-year-old Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler, who had served as chancellor, quickly seized control, forming an all-powerful dictatorship. He is not the president, nor the chancellor, but the omnipotent Führer und Reichskanzler des Deutschen Volkes-"leader and reich chancellor of the German people."
Or just führer.
Winston Churchill has followed Hitler's violent ascent from a distance. He even attempted to meet the führer during a recent visit to Germany but was denied. Hitler saw no sense in spending time with a man possessing no political power. Now Churchill's personal mission includes keeping careful track of Germany's illegal military buildup, and even constructing a network of informants to spy on the Nazi war machine. In this way, he often shocks the House of Commons by presenting outrageous but true statistics about the growing threat. These figures, which many members of Parliament refuse to believe, are not designed to lead Britain into war, but to build the defenses necessary to protect his nation when war arrives. "To urge the preparation of defense is not to assert the imminence of war," he will tell Parliament on November 28. "On the contrary, if war were imminent, preparations for defense would be too late."
Churchill well knows Adolf Hitler's twisted plans include more than just conquest: all enemies of the German government are being rooted out-lawyers, homosexuals, Roma, Communists, and Jews. Hitler reserves his greatest hatred for all things Jewish, a people he blames for the nation's Great War defeat.
To the citizens of Germany, Hitler makes that outrageous claim, building rabid national sentiment against the very existence of Jewish people so he might one day succeed in their extermination. Already, a concentration camp known as Dachau, devoted to the torture, prosecution, and execution of Jews and political prisoners, opened outside Munich in 1933.
But to the people of Great Britain, Adolf Hitler tells a very different lie: Germany does not want war with Europe. She is a buffer state, protecting the continent against the Soviet Union and the spread of global Communism.
And England believes it.
The British like Hitler.
A lot.
Winston Churchill now asks the nation to wake up and confront reality: "These are facts. Hard, grim, indisputable facts, and in face of these facts, I ask again:
"What are we to do?"
• • •
“I have come to the conclusion-reluctantly I admit-that we cannot get away. Here we are. We must make the best of it, but do not, I beg you, underrate the risks, the grievous risks, we have to run. I hope, I pray, and on the whole, grasping the larger hope, I believe that no war will fall upon us. But if in the near future the Great War of 1914 is resumed again in Europe after the armistice, for that is what it may come to under different conditions, in different combinations no doubt, if that should happen no one can tell where and how it would end. Or whether sooner or later we should not be dragged into it, as the USA was dragged in against their will in 1917. Whatever happened, and whatever we did, it would be a time of frightful danger for us.
"First, we must, without another day's delay, begin to make ourselves at least the strongest airpower in the European world. By this means we shall recover to a very large extent the safety which we formerly enjoyed through our navy, and through our being an island. By this means we shall free ourselves from the dangers of being blackmailed against our will either to surrender. . . .
"May God protect us all."
R. J. Mitchell
May 11, 1936
Portsmouth, England
Afternoon
R. J. Mitchell is dying.
A year and a half has passed since Winston Churchill's "Causes of War" speech. The aircraft designer sits alone in his Rolls-Royce with the butter yellow-door panels, parked to one side of Eastleigh Aerodrome's grass runway. Sandy blond hair combed straight back, tweed coat, and knotted tie, colostomy bag anchored to left hip. Mitchell is forty, too young to leave behind a wife and a sixteen-year-old son but accomplished enough to have been awarded one of Britain's top honors by King George V-and this fancy car from the world-famous auto manufacturer.
Mitchell draws on his pipe. Never takes his eyes off a fighter prototype purring over the quilted green Hampshire countryside. The aircraft banks to land. Today's test pilot steers toward the airstrip in a wide arc rather than approaching the runway directly. If anyone else was sitting in the Rolls and cared to ask, Mitchell would explain why the two-bladed propeller and the 900-horsepower V-12 Merlin engine in the nose, the fuel tank behind the Merlin but in front of the cockpit, and the tail-dragger landing gear make Sussex-born Jeffrey Quill's roundabout pattern necessary.
The answer, Mitchell would point out, is simple-and R.J. is a huge believer in the power of a simple explanation: Quill will be flying blind once the nose tilts upward in the last seconds before touchdown. The flier will be able to look out the canopy to the right and left, but the long forward section of the fuselage will block his frontal view. The approach is reconnaissance, a last full view of the runway to ensure there are no obstacles or other chances for ground collision.
Were he not alone, R. J. Mitchell might also talk at length about the concentric square tubing of the new plane's wing spars, the monocoque aluminum skin, the four Browning machine guns inside each wing, and the eighty thousand rivets holding it all together. And the engineer knows by heart precise reasons why the revolutionary elliptical wing means a pronounced advantage in aerial combat-should the rumored war in Europe ever take place.
But right now it is enough for a solitary Reginald Joseph "Reg" Mitchell to set details aside and simply watch fuselage number K5054 fly. A pilot himself, he scrutinizes this final approach. Mitchell sees it all. The engineer has conceived twenty-four aircraft-everything from flying boats to bombers-since assuming the role of chief engineer at Supermarine Aviation Works in 1920.
This is his first fighter.
And what a warrior she is, arguably the most nimble aircraft to ever take flight. A fighter aircraft's primary role is to attack other planes, and K5054 appears quite prepared to do just that. But R. J. Mitchell knows she is still a far cry from the airborne killing machine he promised Britain's Air Ministry. There is still much work to do.
His pilots disagree.
"Don't change a thing," proclaimed Supermarine's lead test pilot, thirty-one-year-old Mutt Summers, upon completing the maiden flight. High praise coming from a salty career flier who earned his nickname by urinating on the rear wheel before climbing into a cockpit.
That date was March 6, two months ago, back when the new plane was supposed to be a secret. Sharp-eyed Portsmouth residents, so used to witnessing Mitchell's revolutionary designs take flight, made a fuss about the unique appearance. K5054 looks different from anything the locals have ever seen.
And this new plane is fast.
Very fast.
For all the many times the people of Portsmouth have craned their necks upward as the loud and lonely thrum of an aircraft engine pierced the calm of a blue-sky day, this fighter is the closest thing to a speeding bullet they have ever seen.
Supermarine has yet to publicly acknowledge the prototype, but as the date for mass production draws near, cryptic advertisements in London newspapers seek men qualified as "bench fitters, sheet metal workers, panel beaters, toolmakers, and assemblers, used to light and actual engineering. Applicants must be able to work to drawings."
The mystery will be revealed soon enough. Next month's Hendon Air Show in North London will be a coming-out party for K5054. British dailies will write of Mitchell's design: "the abolition of everything which could even slightly retard its speed through the air has been carried to a fine art. The fuselage is slim, the wings are cantilever, and there are no bracing wires at all. The outer covering of the wings as well as fuselage is of metal, and the paint which covers the metal is highly polished, for even a rough surface will produce what is known as skin friction and will reduce the speed."
Even when not in flight, the Guardian will add, "the machine as it stood on the ground showed speed in every line."
R. J. Mitchell revels in the praise. The broad-shouldered engineer was an athlete before cancer. Cricket and tennis are no longer part of his life, but he still nurses a deep competitive streak. Mitchell keeps a close eye on rival manufacturer Hawker Aircraft and designer Sydney Camm-at forty-two, two years R.J.'s senior but still undeniably a young man with the same visionary mindset. Hawker is currently working on its own new fighter named the Hurricane.
But Mitchell enjoys being one step ahead. Though similar in appearance to K5054, Camm's design is slower, a throwback to a previous era when cockpits were open to the wind and rain; when landing gear was fixed into position, not folding neatly into the undercarriage after takeoff; when wings were stacked one on top of the other, wrapped in canvas, braced with wires and struts. Indeed, the wood-framed Hurricane is based on a biplane known as the Fury. Five years into its military service, Fury is already obsolete.
R. J. Mitchell has the design edge over Hawker for now, but only as long as he continues making K5054 better. There are nuances to perfect before transitioning from prototype to mass production: the piston-driven engine tends to stall in a steep dive, the fuel tank's forward position represents a fire risk to the pilot, 20mm cannon might be a better choice than .50-caliber guns, and so on. Mitchell will find his answer by questioning test pilot Quill about today's performance after he lands, then retreating into his office at Supermarine. His personal secretary Vera Cross will halt all visitors and hold all calls until the designer emerges with a solution. "His mood is not right," Miss Cross will warn. "Better leave it until later."
